Cooler Guns: Payday 2 Reworks First-Person Animations

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I don’t know why you’d shoot men with an uncool gun. Why have a daggy lump of crud clogging up the corner of your screen when you’re trying to do cool murders? I must confess my FPS preferences for huge revolvers, pump-action shotguns, and bolt-action rifles is partially down to them being super cool crimetools (also: their murderpower, tense pauses, and chunky sounds).

Payday 2 [official site] now has cooler guns. Coming up on two years after launch, Developers Overkill Software have gone back and reworked a load of the robbery FPS’s first-person animations, from reloading guns to shouty gestures. They’ve also added proper transparent magazines to older guns which have ’em, showing the bullets deplete as you fire. Cool guns.

Here, the announcement post has more pictures and animated gifs of the cool guns being cool as you reload. The movements seem more organic and flowy, and are perhaps a little more lively than necessary because: coolness. “Most” guns have received updated reload, equip, recoil, and melee animations. It seems Overkill have also left in – gasp! – unnecessary fiddling with bits of guns that go click-clack-shuunkkk, which is good, because making more cool metal noises makes guns cooler. Cool guns.

It’s not all guns! guns! guns! mind. As the patch notes explain, Overkill have also reworked first-person animations for things like being handcuffed or tased, and shouting to intimidate people.

Now let’s see them put their animation chops to work on cool idle animations like whipping out string to stretch out a cat’s cradle or doing yo-yo tricks. Perhaps they might add a Conjurer skill tree to distract guards and civilians with card tricks; when things go south they pull an Uzi out a hat.

Of all the problems they’ve ignored since launch (no reconnect button when disconnected, no host migration, flakey netcode) animations were so far down my list of problems they honestly weren’t even on the list.

My experience has been that the netcode does a pretty well fantastic job when compared to the likes of Left 4 Dead and other such hoard games, which tend to lose every ounce of tactility should you and friends be on different coasts, yet Payday manages to make it all but unnoticeable as long as your ping doesn’t exceed a quarter of a second, and even then, it’s handled well…but it flops pretty hard when it comes to stealth, becoming just unplayable at moderate levels of delay, when you’d think it would be incredibly simple to just simulate enemy vision client-side, as is in single-player.

But yes, the way it handles disconnects is utterly shameful, through and through.

Everyone who wants a modern warfare manshoot that starts off normal and then progresses into the uncanny valley untill it is revealed that you’re actually a Lovecraftian horror fighting other Lovecraftian horrors, raise your hands.

I feel like there needs to be a little more slack between a reload animation ‘finishing’ and the actual reload operation finishing. I occasionally find that I’ll reload my gun, and start sprinting/change weapon when the reload looks finished, only to find that my ‘reloaded’ gun is empty.

Yes! In some games (Payday 2 is one of them) the animation can get to the point where the new magazine has been inserted, the slide released to chamber a round, a satisfying click is played, but the gun is still “empty” until some variable point after that when the ammo counter on the HUD goes up. People rag on Call of Duty but it invariably gets that side of things right, and it’s quite jarring to go from that to a game that gets it wrong. Subtle difference but one that really aids immersion, etc.

All the weapons in CS seem to have a small but noticeable *click* or other sound that coincides with the reload being finished. After that, you can begin firing, switch weapons, or whatever you need to do.

Urgh slap the bolt release it’s there for a reason! There are enough videos of tacticool gun guys on YouTube these days that mistakes like that should be easy to address prior to dumping hours into a new animation.

Cool weapons? Cool weapons? In my time (ca. Goldeney 64) we’d shoot a gun that was just a black rectangle and was reloaded by being briefly removed from the screen as if James Bond was playing House of the Dead and we’d LIKE IT!

Honestly have not been able to tell the difference since the patch. Maybe it would have been better to mix in the old ones from time to time, because the new ones are simply the new normal and aren’t exactly bursting with originality in the first place.

Translucent mags are cool, though. Too bad you can only really see the one on the P90, and it’s got a wicked glare effect so you can’t really see through it anyway.